I used Xandros 2.0 for over a few months, and I loved it. Everything worked, I beat windows users at there own game, new hardware? plug-in and play, say why are you looking for drivers?, starting applications?, nice menu, Internet->Browser, Office->Writer, why are you looking at Start->Programs->MS Office->Word?
Really while running Xandros, I beat the snot out of any windows instalation, it is that good, I loved that part, and hated it most of all, because I felt that I lost my Linux Control, so I'm back to Debian and Gentoo.
But where not importand here, most of the Slashdot crowd has no problem using a distro like Debian and reading some manuals, where already using Linux.
Now enter my Girlfriend, who hates, I state here, hates PC's, if they don't work, if they slip, she gets mad, real mad at the PC in 5 seconds flat. She kept screaming at here MS Windows, and I kept saying, hey, Xandros is on another partion give it a try then. And after getting mad she did, now she still get's mad at Xandros once in a while, but that's mostly websites that don't work because there IE only, and she's more pissed that she as a customer isn't getting respected for using an OS that does work.
Since she can complain about absolutly everything, I signed her up for the beta test, because I believe she can saddle up the Xandros people with enough things the "average" user cares about that they have enough for Xandros 4.0!:)
She found plenty of things she wanted "fixed", now ofcourse I fixed it, using "IT Ninja Tech Support" ( SSH ), but I think she sees the stuff we, the geeks miss.
I don't care what system someone else uses when I don't have to fix it, but if the average user starts using Linux, we win also, because hardware will get Linux support, we can demand open source drivers ( hey, you want native support for 15% of the market and growing?, then you better get of you horse and give is stable debuggable code ). Not to mention that websites start taking care of there HTML code, maybe even force IE to be standards compliant, force MS Office into supporting KOffice and OpenOffice.org documents
We might not like it, but we need these average users to be seens as Full
I use Cedega for some games, like CoH and SW:Galaxies en BF:Vietnam.
Hmm, for the price of WinXP ( Non-OEM ) I would pay around 150-200 euro's, Cedega costs me about 50 euro's a year, so I can use it for 3 years before it starts to cost more.
It isn't perfect, not all games run and sometimes it takes some work to get a game up and running. But it's good enough so I don't need a dual boot system for it. I can now join in for a "quick" game of BF:Vietnam without closing my browser, my editor, my 4 SSH terminals, my Kopete IM, my E-mail.
I want games, I don't want windows, and I do REGISTER my games and add to it that I'm playing it UNDER LINUX, and would like to see a native port.
I get to play most games, Cedega get's some money, and the game companies ( hopfully ) get more and more registrations stating there running on Linux.
And I hope that one day someone says, hey, 10% of the registrations states they want a native Linux version, maybe we should look into it?
Sure a lot of companies might say, nah, it runs fine through that Cedega thing, but my bet is that a lot will also say, those people aren't getting the 100% game experience, that gives us a bad name, let's make sure it runs 100% for those 10% userbase.
Another great point is that I now am able to get my Dad on Linux, because he wanted to keep windows for EQ only. And I know a lot of people that just want to play that one racer, that one flightsim. Sure they won't be able to play the latest version right away, but mostly, give it a month or 2.
It's a problem all to common, installing Linux on the "old" system and not putting Gnome or KDE on it because of "hardware".
And then people are complaining that it's slow and not as friendly as Windows.
I do get some complaints from friends when they sit down behind my workstation at home. But that's only because they want to nag, after the "euw, linux" they just look, click the K, go to internet, run firefox and doing what they where going to do.
Now if only I could get them to ditch there Windows Only games, I could all change them to linux zealots.:)
This I think is a great example of splitting the 2, mkisofs and cdrecord spend there time on doing one thing only, make CD's
Then I install K3B, that uses these tools, but fills in the long commmandlines with a nice Drag&Drop interface.
So now I have a burning app that's nice looking, with a rocksolid buring program that's well tested.
Ofcourse, it would be nice if K3B provided a nice error message when CDRecord didn't work, I can read those Debug messages, so it works great for me, but try explaining it to my mother.
Point here is that the UI part should be done by a company, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Xandros, they make Linux easy to use. I'm a techie, so I use Debian or Gentoo, but I wouldn't recommend that to anybody that's starting
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I used Xandros 2.0 for over a few months, and I loved it. Everything worked, I beat windows users at there own game, new hardware? plug-in and play, say why are you looking for drivers?, starting applications?, nice menu, Internet->Browser, Office->Writer, why are you looking at Start->Programs->MS Office->Word? :)
Really while running Xandros, I beat the snot out of any windows instalation, it is that good, I loved that part, and hated it most of all, because I felt that I lost my Linux Control, so I'm back to Debian and Gentoo.
But where not importand here, most of the Slashdot crowd has no problem using a distro like Debian and reading some manuals, where already using Linux.
Now enter my Girlfriend, who hates, I state here, hates PC's, if they don't work, if they slip, she gets mad, real mad at the PC in 5 seconds flat. She kept screaming at here MS Windows, and I kept saying, hey, Xandros is on another partion give it a try then. And after getting mad she did, now she still get's mad at Xandros once in a while, but that's mostly websites that don't work because there IE only, and she's more pissed that she as a customer isn't getting respected for using an OS that does work.
Since she can complain about absolutly everything, I signed her up for the beta test, because I believe she can saddle up the Xandros people with enough things the "average" user cares about that they have enough for Xandros 4.0!
She found plenty of things she wanted "fixed", now ofcourse I fixed it, using "IT Ninja Tech Support" ( SSH ), but I think she sees the stuff we, the geeks miss.
I don't care what system someone else uses when I don't have to fix it, but if the average user starts using Linux, we win also, because hardware will get Linux support, we can demand open source drivers ( hey, you want native support for 15% of the market and growing?, then you better get of you horse and give is stable debuggable code ).
Not to mention that websites start taking care of there HTML code, maybe even force IE to be standards compliant, force MS Office into supporting KOffice and OpenOffice.org documents
We might not like it, but we need these average users to be seens as Full
I use Cedega for some games, like CoH and SW:Galaxies en BF:Vietnam. Hmm, for the price of WinXP ( Non-OEM ) I would pay around 150-200 euro's, Cedega costs me about 50 euro's a year, so I can use it for 3 years before it starts to cost more. It isn't perfect, not all games run and sometimes it takes some work to get a game up and running. But it's good enough so I don't need a dual boot system for it. I can now join in for a "quick" game of BF:Vietnam without closing my browser, my editor, my 4 SSH terminals, my Kopete IM, my E-mail. I want games, I don't want windows, and I do REGISTER my games and add to it that I'm playing it UNDER LINUX, and would like to see a native port. I get to play most games, Cedega get's some money, and the game companies ( hopfully ) get more and more registrations stating there running on Linux. And I hope that one day someone says, hey, 10% of the registrations states they want a native Linux version, maybe we should look into it? Sure a lot of companies might say, nah, it runs fine through that Cedega thing, but my bet is that a lot will also say, those people aren't getting the 100% game experience, that gives us a bad name, let's make sure it runs 100% for those 10% userbase. Another great point is that I now am able to get my Dad on Linux, because he wanted to keep windows for EQ only. And I know a lot of people that just want to play that one racer, that one flightsim. Sure they won't be able to play the latest version right away, but mostly, give it a month or 2.
It's a problem all to common, installing Linux on the "old" system and not putting Gnome or KDE on it because of "hardware". And then people are complaining that it's slow and not as friendly as Windows. I do get some complaints from friends when they sit down behind my workstation at home. But that's only because they want to nag, after the "euw, linux" they just look, click the K, go to internet, run firefox and doing what they where going to do. Now if only I could get them to ditch there Windows Only games, I could all change them to linux zealots. :)
This I think is a great example of splitting the 2, mkisofs and cdrecord spend there time on doing one thing only, make CD's
Then I install K3B, that uses these tools, but fills in the long commmandlines with a nice Drag&Drop interface.
So now I have a burning app that's nice looking, with a rocksolid buring program that's well tested.
Ofcourse, it would be nice if K3B provided a nice error message when CDRecord didn't work, I can read those Debug messages, so it works great for me, but try explaining it to my mother.
Point here is that the UI part should be done by a company, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Xandros, they make Linux easy to use. I'm a techie, so I use Debian or Gentoo, but I wouldn't recommend that to anybody that's starting